Mark Harrison's bloghttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison
en-GB(C) 2019 Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssMark HarrisonMark HarrisonWarwick Blogs, University of Warwick, https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk120Going Viral: How a Dictatorship Suppresses Ideological Infection by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/going_viral/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/infected-08082018173807.html" title="Related external link: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/infected-08082018173807.html">https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/infected-08082018173807.html</a></p>
<p>Sometimes it is said that a popular image or tweet or a video clip has &quot;gone viral.&quot; That means that it has been shared from person to person many times, like an infection. </p>
<p>When we use this image, we think of ideas spreading on an epidemiological model. Some people have little resistance and so they are highly vulnerable. After just one exposure, they are taken over by the idea and become carriers. Then, they pass it on to more people like themselves who are also of low resistance. A pool is formed of people who pass the idea in question backwards and forwards and, in the process, expose many others. These others might be more highly resistant, and are captured by the idea only after repeated exposure, which happens over a period of time. Eventually, as more and more people are exposed more and more times, the infection will spread to everyone who is not for some reason immune.</p>
<p>The same model, according to which ideas spread like a disease, is often found in the practical thinking of authoritarian regimes. Such regimes often prescribe a particular set of ideas as &quot;healthy&quot; -- for example, obedience to the state and loyalty to the ruler, each embodying or personifying the nation. A source of danger to the regime is then the spread of &quot;unhealthy&quot; ideas, which might encourage disrespect of authority or public demonstrations of discontent. They worry that ideas about free speech or the accountability of rulers, if unchecked, might go viral, undermining the stability of the regime.</p>
<p>The epidemiological model also prescribes the remedy. Risks to public health are contained by keeping the community under continuous surveillance, by quickly identifying outbreaks of disease, and stepping in immediately to isolate the people who have become ideologically sick, preventing them from passing on their infection more widely.</p>
<p>This remedy can be seen at work today in China's province of Xinjiang, where the Chinese state is trying to manage the largely Muslim ethnic minority of Uighurs. <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2018/08/18/china-suggests-its-camps-for-uighurs-are-just-vocational-schools">On August 18, The Economist reported</a>:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>During the past year campaigners, academics and journalists have been shedding light on the detention for &ldquo;re-education&rdquo; of vast numbers of ethnic-Uighur Muslims in China&rsquo;s far-western province of Xinjiang. On August 13th the topic was raised at the UN, when experts undertaking an audit of China&rsquo;s policies towards ethnic minorities said they had heard that as many as 1m Uighurs are being locked away.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The Economist's report went on to cite a recording by the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region communist party youth league, made last year and published on WeChat. <a href="https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/infected-08082018173807.html">The full transcript can be found on the Radio Free Asia</a> website, and that's where I have taken the following excerpt:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>In recent times, amid a growing heavy crackdown, a small number of people&mdash;particularly young people&mdash;have gone to re-education camps to study. However, their parents, friends and relatives, and the general public don&rsquo;t understand the benefits of re-education, and as a result they are worried and fearful. So let us give answers to their questions and their concerns today.</p>
<p> Members of the public who have been chosen for re-education have been infected by an ideological illness. They have been infected with religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology, and therefore they must seek treatment from a hospital as an inpatient. In recent years, there have been violent incidents occurring in Xinjiang, one after another, instigated by the &ldquo;three evil forces [of &ldquo;terrorism,&rdquo; &ldquo;religious extremism,&rdquo; and &ldquo;separatism&rdquo;], which has threatened the safety of people from all ethnic communities and caused serious damage and losses. These terrorists have one thing in common: they were infected by religious extremism and a violent terrorism disease.</p>
<p> The religious extremist ideology is a type of poisonous medicine which confuses the mind of the people. Once they are poisoned by it, some turn into extremists who no longer value even their own lives &hellip; If we do not eradicate religious extremism at its roots, the violent terrorist incidents will grow and spread all over like an incurable malignant tumor.</p>
<p> Although a certain number of people who have been indoctrinated with extremist ideology have not committed any crimes, they are already infected by the disease. There is always a risk that the illness will manifest itself at any moment, which would cause serious harm to the public. That is why they must be admitted to a re-education hospital in time to treat and cleanse the virus from their brain and restore their normal mind. We must be clear that going into a re-education hospital for treatment is not a way of forcibly arresting people and locking them up for punishment, it is an act that is part of a comprehensive rescue mission to save them.</p>
<p> In order to provide treatment to people who are infected with ideological illnesses and to ensure the effectiveness of the treatment, the Autonomous Regional Party Committee decided to set up re-education camps in all regions, organizing special staff to teach state and provincial laws, regulations, the party&rsquo;s ethnic and religious policies, and various other guidelines. They mobilized the public to learn the common language [Mandarin Chinese], complete various technical training courses, and take part in cultural and sport activities, teaching them what is correct and incorrect &hellip; so they can clearly distinguish right from wrong &hellip; At the end of re-education, the infected members of the public return to a healthy ideological state of mind, which guarantees them the ability to live a beautiful happy life with their families.</p>
<p>Ideological illnesses are the same as physical illnesses, in that they must be treated in time, and should never be ignored and allowed to become serious. Otherwise, later we will regret it, as it will be too late &hellip; Being infected by religious extremism and violent terrorist ideology and not seeking treatment is like being infected by a disease that has not been treated in time, or like taking toxic drugs &hellip; There is no guarantee that it will not trigger and affect you in the future. If people don&rsquo;t attend re-education class because there is no one to take responsibility for the household chores, or if they choose to run away from re-education, that can be considered being very irresponsible to themselves, their families and society.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can see that the Chinese communist party youth league's model of the spread of ideas, expressed in this long quotation, is not intellectually consistent. The unhealthy ideas are sometimes called a &quot;virus,&quot; sometimes a &quot;poisonous medicine.&quot; But the general idea of ideological infection could not be clearer: &quot;Ideological illnesses are the same as physical illnesses.&quot; </p>
<p>One feature of this perspective is that people who have been infected are not to blame (unless they refuse treatment). Another is that they are not seen as lost to the community; they can be saved (or they must help to save themselves). Nonetheless, as long as they are inflected by unhealthy ideas, they are a danger to the community as well as to themselves -- even if they are legally innocent of any crime. Therefore, compulsion is justified to treat them.</p>
<p>PS</p>
<p>Why am I interested? In another context, the Soviet KGB (security police) used the terminology of &quot;unhealthy&quot; ideas and behaviours, and of methods of &quot;prophylaxis&quot; (a medical term for prevention), all the time in internal correspondence and reports. If you would like to read more about this, there are some human-interest stories and more discussion in my book, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147">One Day We Will Live Without Fear</a>, especially chapter 5.</p>ChinaCommunismHistoryPoliticsFri, 24 Aug 2018 19:02:09 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/going_viral/#comments8a1784e66541eae601656d26309b00300The Soviet Economy Collapsed After the World for Which it was Designed Disappeared by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_soviet_economy_1_2/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="https://www.elindependiente.com/opinion/2017/10/28/por-que-colapso-la-economia-sovietica/" title="Related external link: https://www.elindependiente.com/opinion/2017/10/28/por-que-colapso-la-economia-sovietica/">https://www.elindependiente.com/opinion/2017/10/28/por-que-colapso-la-economia-sovietica/</a></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This column appeared (in Spanish) on 28 October on the website of El Independiente.</p>
<p>Soviet economic institutions were inspired by two western economic models of the early twentieth century. One was the German war economy of the Great War, which Lenin observed and admired for its government priorities, the control of supply chains by committees of industrialists, the rationing of commodities at fixed prices, and obligatory labour mobilization. The other was the American system of mass production of standardized products in great factories under centralized management.</p>
<p>Combined with an authoritarian single-party dictatorship, these two models made the Soviet economy as it emerged under Stalin and persisted until 1991. Everything was designed for mobilization, production, accumulation, and expansion. To ensure this, the state owned nearly everything and directed nearly everything from the centre, either by decree or by pressure to conform, backed up by the secret police. The citizens were motivated to comply with authority by a mixture of patriotic appeals, fear, and meagre rewards. The economy could supply basic consumer goods and services, but its special advantage lay in supplying the means of national power in the world, especially a mass army with vast quantities of standardized weapons. By the outbreak of World War II, Stalin&rsquo;s Soviet Union had become one the world&rsquo;s two leading producers of armaments, the other being Hitler&rsquo;s Germany.</p>
<p>The Soviet economy was capable of growth, but it never proved capable of catching up with the innovative market economies of the time. Moreover, the growth rate of the Soviet economy steadily deteriorated through the postwar period. From the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union was falling further behind the United States in productivity and prosperity. While its economy began to stagnate, the Soviet Union faced additional challenges of the time. One challenge arose from the U.S. rearmament under Presidents Carter and Reagan. Another arose from the self-imposed burden of the Soviet Union&rsquo;s entanglement in Afghanistan. In the international economy the Soviet Union was reliant on the oil market, where prices collapsed.</p>
<p>The Soviet leaders made repeated efforts to overcome economic constraints through reforms. The reforms sought to raise productivity by decentralizing management and improving incentives for efficient behaviour, while retaining the framework of state ownership and the party monopoly of power. All such reforms failed, as the economy reverted to its basic type. Later, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping would say that the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was a fool for abandoning the party monopoly of power without reforming the economy. But this was unfair. Gorbachev did so only after all economic reforms had been tried, including most of the reforms that had been tried out successfully in China. Why they failed in the Soviet Union is an important story, but one for another time.</p>
<p>The end of the Soviet economy cannot be explained by economic factors alone. This should be clear from the example of countries like Cuba and North Korea, where ruling parties are facing vastly greater economic problems and threats than the Soviet Union ever faced, yet regimes have not collapsed. In the case of the Soviet Union, politics was decisive. The conservative generation of leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev, born in the early twentieth century, died out. A new generation took command, led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The new generation was more open-minded, and their open minds had been influenced by the ideas of the dissident movement &ndash; nationalist, liberal, or social-democratic. Gorbachev was decisively influenced by ideas about social democracy and rule by consent. He did not want to rule at any price, or to rule by fear. Once it became widely understood that resistance to power would not be punished, people stopped being afraid. The Soviet Union became ungovernable and fell apart.</p>
<p>Politics was decisive in the moment, but at the same time we should not ignore the deeper economic forces. The Soviet economy was designed for a world of mass production and mass armies. That is no longer the world in which we live. In the 1970s, the information revolution gave rise to flexible production and a services economy based on information sharing. In the same decade, precision guidance and miniaturized nuclear weapons put an end to the idea that the future of Europe could be decided by a great battle fought by thousands of tanks and planes and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the central European plain. The world for which the Soviet economy had been designed was disappearing. The Soviet Union had no future. No one should want to see it return.</p>1917CommunismEconomicsHistoryPoliticsRussiaWarSat, 28 Oct 2017 08:48:57 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_soviet_economy_1_2/#comments8a1784e55cf94e17015f622b79bd09ad0Kompromat: itís What We Donít Know, Not What We Know by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/kompromat_its_what/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38589427" title="Related external link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38589427">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38589427</a></p>
<p>The Steele memorandum, with its lurid tales of Donald Trump and &ldquo;golden showers,&rdquo; has put <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-38589427">kompromat in the news</a>. </p>
<p>Kompromat is the Russian term, a colloquial abbreviation, for &ldquo;compromising evidence.&rdquo; When did it arise? Sometimes there's the impression that it is a recent thing &ndash; a feature of post-Soviet Russia. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/12/donald-trump-russia-dossier-frighteningly-true">Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the KGB, describes kompromat</a> as &ldquo;a tactic to smear one&rsquo;s opponents in the media&rdquo; that &ldquo;came into use in Russia in the late 1990s.&rdquo; Likewise, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/kompromat-trump-dossier/512891/">Julia Joffe links kompromat</a> to cases that became frequent in Russia in the 1990s, involving what Russians call &ldquo;black PR&rdquo; &ndash; the use of real or faked evidence of wrong doing to discredit political opponents in the public arena. </p>
<p>It&rsquo;s true that, to judge from the Google Ngram viewer, kompromat was completely unknown until the mid-1980s, when Soviet censorship collapsed, and its use became widespread only in the 1990s. (The figure below shows both the abbreviated and unabbreviated forms of kompromat; they show similar patterns. I can't explain the spikes during World War II; they might just be a random consequence of relatively few books entering the Google Books corpus from that time.)</p>
<p><iframe name="ngram_chart" src="https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%83%D1%8E%D1%89%D0%B8%D0%B5+%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8B%2C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82&amp;year_start=1900&amp;year_end=2015&amp;corpus=25&amp;smoothing=0&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%80%D1%83%D1%8E%D1%89%D0%B8%D0%B5%20%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8B%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D1%82%3B%2Cc0" width="900" height="500" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe></p>
<p>But this pattern also reflects the limitation to published print media. For the first seventy years of its life the term kompromat was used very widely, but only by Soviet government and party officials in the secret documentation that can now be found in archives. In Soviet times, kompromat denoted the security files that documented the political crimes, misdemeanours, and faults of the citizens. In this sense its use goes back almost a century. The Soviet secret police was founded in 1918, and it began storing kompromat as soon as the circumstances of civil war allowed it to turn from killing people to recording their weaknesses.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s an example. You&rsquo;re following suspect A, let&rsquo;s say, someone who is suspected of passing information to foreigners. In the street, A greets a stranger, who now becomes suspect B. Someone else will now follow suspect B and identify him. After that, the officer in charge will write a note to KGB records: &ldquo;Is there kompromat on B?&rdquo; And the answer will come back, yes or no. If no, too bad. If yes, it might be that B listens to Western radio, or sends letters abroad, or comes from a family that once had property, or is Jewish, or gets drunk and, when drunk, is liable to curse the communist party and its leaders. For any of these is a sign that B might hold a grudge against the political and social order and should therefore be considered potentially disloyal.</p>
<p>Now, suppose there does exist kompromat on B. The question is, what do you do now? In the Soviet practice of kompromat the answer is that you do not, under any circumstances, take it to the media. On the contrary, you file it and store it. </p>
<p>In Soviet times, kompromat had a mass application and a targeted application. The mass application was to grade people in very large numbers. Then, when someone sought promotion at work, or entry to higher education, or a foreign trip, the KGB would check its files for kompromat, and the files would tell it whether to say yes or no. The evidence would never be disclosed. Nonetheless, it is clear that most Soviet citizens understood the importance of not accumulating kompromat, and this influenced their behaviour in ways that were favourable to the stability of the regime.</p>
<p>Kompromat had a more targeted use. Although arguably of less importance in history than its mass application, this is the meaning of kompromat that is of greater interest today.</p>
<p>In cases where an individual person such as B was targeted, the kompromat would be useful, not when it was published to punish or discredit B, but because it was kept secret. And, used in this way, kompromat had the magical quality that it could turn people who might otherwise have been reluctant or recalcitrant into productive material for the regime.</p>
<p>Kompromat in this sense is blackmail, but no money changes hands. You would use the kompromat to persuade B to cooperate in your task, whatever that might be: for example, you might recruit him as an informer. You would apply the pressure slowly, over a long period of time, and during all this time the kompromat would remain secret, and would never be disclosed, but would be a gift that keeps giving.</p>
<p>This principle was applied not only in police matters, but more widely in politics. The party boss must promote one of two subordinates. Which should he choose, the one that is clean, or the one with a flawed past, documented by kompromat? The choice was clear. The untainted subordinate could become a rival; better promote the one the boss could control, the one who was obligated to the boss by his silence. In a low-trust organization, in other words, kompromat is the key that guarantees loyalty.</p>
<p>In these cases, you can see, the moment the targeted kompromat reaches the public, it loses its power to control the target, for that power lies in secrecy. You promise to keep the information secret while B works with you and your organization. You have given B something to lose. Hold the kompromat forever, and forever your collaborator will be obligated to you.</p>
<p>Today&rsquo;s use of kompromat to cover the publication of discreditable information &ndash; real or fake &ndash; is, in comparison, a break with its traditional meaning. To hold kompromat is to hope that the target, the person on whom kompromat is held, might one day be useful. The dissemination of kompromat signals that you&rsquo;ve given up that hope. The target has nothing left to lose, and can no longer be manipulated.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the bottom line. To read discreditable stories about our leaders is a worry. We should worry about these stories and try to evaluate them carefully, as best we can. But don&rsquo;t worry about the stories too much. If they&rsquo;re false, we should discard them, and, if they&rsquo;re true, at least we know.</p>
<p>And we know, also, that kompromat that is published is spent and has no more value. The kompromat that still has value, that retains its magical power to induce cooperation, is the kompromat that is held back. If you like to lie awake at night and worry pointlessly about who is manipulating our leaders, you should think about the kompromat that we don&rsquo;t know and will never hear. As I said, it's pointless.</p>
<p>PS Lots more like this in my book of stories, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/">One Day We Will Live Without Fear</a>.</p>CommunismHistoryKgbPoliticsMon, 16 Jan 2017 07:00:02 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/kompromat_its_what/#comments8a1784e656bce0ee01599e393eb11c710When Central and Eastern Europe Led the World by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/when_central_and/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7VJ1wykdp_YdXBiT3ZCT3FKNGM/view" title="Related external link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7VJ1wykdp_YdXBiT3ZCT3FKNGM/view">https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7VJ1wykdp_YdXBiT3ZCT3FKNGM/view</a></p>
<p>Last week I spent a few days in Regensburg, a pretty town in Bavaria. The subject of our conference was the economic history of central, eastern, and southeastern Europe since 1800. The meeting was convened by the excellent Matthias Morys of the University of York; Matthias is <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7VJ1wykdp_YdXBiT3ZCT3FKNGM/view">editing a book on this theme for Routledge</a>. The general standard of the chapters is going to be exceptional. (I&rsquo;m not an author; I went along to hear and discuss.)</p>
<p>An important theme of the book will be how central and eastern Europe lagged behind western Europe in productivity and social well-being, and the varying successes and (mostly) failures of the region in closing the gap. This raised a question: Should central and eastern Europe always be judged against western European countries, as though we (the West) set the only standards that count? Shouldn&rsquo;t everyone try to understand that region in its own terms, without negative preconceptions?</p>
<p>We had reached the interwar period of 1918 to 1939 when a commentator raised this question sharply. It&rsquo;s a good question, and it brings us in a surprising direction. Think about it: what were the standards that the nation states and regimes of Central and Eastern Europe set themselves, whether in the interwar period or over the last two centuries? Often enough, the answer turns out to be, the goal that they set was to catch up with Western Europe.</p>
<p>At first sight this takes us back to where we started, to the standards of productivity and social well-being set in Western Europe. But this would not be strictly accurate. When the states and rulers of central and eastern Europe set out to catch up, it was not so much in average incomes or welfare, which were not even measured systematically until the middle of the twentieth century. The dimension in which they aimed to catch up was that of national power.</p>
<p>As it turns out, the first decades of the twentieth century were a time of great success for two of the countries of central and eastern Europe in the race to catch up and overtake western Europe in national power. These countries were Germany and the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>National power can be measured, although imperfectly. The scholars of the Correlates of War project set out to measure the global distribution of national power with a &ldquo;composite index of national capability&rdquo; (CINC) designed to capture &ldquo;the ability of a nation to exercise and resist influence.&rdquo; A country&rsquo;s CINC score combines six indicators of its relative weight in the international system, year by year: total population, urban population, iron and steel production, energy consumption, military personnel, and military expenditure. On this measure, in 1871, the Russian and German Empires together accounted for one fifth of the total of power in the world (12 percent for Germany and 8 percent for Russia). By 1914, through industrialization and rearmament, they had pushed up their combined weight to more than one quarter (14 percent to Germany, 12 percent to Russia). And by 1940, after more expansion and more rearmament, when Hitler&rsquo;s and Stalin&rsquo;s regimes were temporarily in alliance, their share had risen to nearly one third (17 percent to Germany, 14 percent to the Soviet Union).</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">(<a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/manage/publications/283-2016_harrison.pdf">For data sources and more context, look at Table 1 of this paper</a>.)</p>
<p>Within 70 years, in summary, the two great powers of central and eastern Europe transferred more than one tenth of global power into their own hands. This was a dramatic shift in the balance of power, and a stunning achievement.</p>
<p>Thinking about this, I said in the conference: You want us to celebrate the aspects in which the countries of eentral and eastern Europe led the world at the time? OK, let&rsquo;s hear it for autocracy, aggression, and mass killing. I was trying to be ironic, but I wasn&rsquo;t sure if something got lost in translation.</p>
<p>Of course, you could be central or east European and be happy. Anywhere in the region, most of the time, you could live, love, carry on a trade, make a family, make art, make science, teach, and build. You could try to lead a good life, a life no worse than the lives led by anyone to the West. Bad things might happen to interrupt these efforts anywhere in Europe, west or east. For centuries, however, if you lived to the east of the Rhine, the probability that your efforts would be cruelly ended by young men in uniform under orders from above was much, much greater.</p>
<p>To understand why is the challenge for Matthias and his co-authors..</p>EconomicsHistoryHitlerStalinThu, 02 Jun 2016 07:00:51 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/when_central_and/#comments094d73cc54ddbe7301550c823b9705da0The KGB Gave my Book its Title by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_kgb_gave/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/" title="Related external link: http://www.amazon.com/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/">http://www.amazon.com/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/</a></p>
<p>My book <em>One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State</em> is published today in the US. It will be available in Europe from February 29. This is the story behind the title of the last chapter of my book, which I also used as the title of the book as a whole.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s 1958. David is chatting to his friend. Their subject is David&rsquo;s dream, which is to emigrate. He&rsquo;s a Jew, living in Vilnius, the capital of Soviet Lithuania. He was once a Polish citizen, born on territory that was absorbed by the Soviet Union in 1939 when Stalin and Hitler split Poland between them. Suddenly, David was a Soviet citizen. In World War II he fought in the Red Army. After the war he settled in Vilnius, got married, and made a family. </p>
<p>In the 1950s there was a short window when the Soviet authorities allowed people like David, born Polish, to leave for Poland if they wished. His younger sister, Leila, left for Poland the previous year, and from there she was able to travel on to Israel. David did not go with her, but now he regrets that he stayed behind. He would like to follow her, but he finds that he is trapped. Whether he left it too late, or for some other reason, the government will not let him go.</p>
<p>David tells his friend that he has become afraid of even asking about permission to leave.</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>It could turn out that you put your papers in to OVIR [the Visa and Registration Department] and they give them back to you, and then you get a ticket to Siberia, or they can put you in jail.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>David has come to a decision. There's no point dreaming about leaving, he tells his friend. He has concluded it's dangerous even to think about it. He realizes he is going nowhere. He and his family will stay at home. But then he comes back to another thought, perhaps even more dangerous, that he cannot help but voice:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>We&rsquo;ll stay in Vilnius and we'll live in the hope that he [one of the Soviet leaders of the time, not named] and generally this whole system will smash their heads in, and maybe we will live here freely and without fear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After that, David&rsquo;s friend went home and made a note of the words David had used. In due course he passed the note to his handling officer, because this friend, unknown to David, was a KGB informer. The note ended up in the files of the Soviet Lithuania KGB, where I came across it more than half a century later.</p>
<p>The KGB handler thought David's remarks were pretty interesting. At the end of the report he summed up:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>Report: Information on David received for the first time.</p>
<p>Assignment: The source [David's friend] should establish a relationship of trust with David and clarify his contacts. Investigate his political inclinations and way of life.</p>
<p>Actions: Identify David and verify his records.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Few people who lived in Soviet times ever imagined those times would come to an end. David was one of the few.</p>
<h2><a href="http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/markharrison/2016/01/29/oneday.jpg?maxWidth=1024&amp;maxHeight=768" rel="lightbox" title="One Day We Will Live Without Fear"><img src="http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/markharrison/2016/01/29/oneday.jpg?maxWidth=200" alt="One Day We Will Live Without Fear" border="0" /></a><br />
</h2>
<p>What was life in the Soviet Union really like? Through a series of true stories, <em>One Day We Will Live Without Fear</em> describes what people's day-to-day life was like under the regime of the Soviet police state. Drawing on events from the 1930s through the 1970s, Mark Harrison shows how, by accident or design, people became entangled in the workings of Soviet rule. The author outlines the seven principles on which that police state operated during its history, from the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and illustrates them throughout the book. Well-known people appear in the stories, but the central characters are those who will have been remembered only within their families: a budding artist, an engineer, a pensioner, a government office worker, a teacher, a group of tourists. Those tales, based on historical records, shine a light on the many tragic, funny, and bizarre aspects of Soviet life</p>
<p><em>One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State</em>, by Mark Harrison, is published on 2 February 2016 by the Hoover Press in Stanford, California. Order it today from<a href="http://www.amazon.com/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/"> Amazon US</a> or pre-order it from <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-Will-Live-Without-Fear/dp/0817919147/">Amazon UK</a>.</p>CommunismHistoryPoliticsRussiaTue, 02 Feb 2016 08:00:29 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_kgb_gave/#comments094d73cc511b2baa01528f83d42519250Group, then Threaten: How Bad Ideas Move Millions by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/how_do_bad/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719" title="Related external link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719">http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719</a></p>
<p>I've been thinking: What is it that enables a bad idea suddenly to spread across millions of people? Here are some of the things I have in mind:</p>
<ul>
<li>In France the National Front is reported as leading all other parties in current opinion polls, having won barely 10 percent of the vote in the 2007 presidential election.</li>
<li>In January's general election, nearly 40 percent of Greek voters supported Syriza, compared wtih fewer than 5 percent as recently as 2009.</li>
<li>Since narrowly rejecting indendence in last year's referendum, Scotland's voters have rallied to the Scottish National Party, support for which is now reported at over than 40 percent compared with less than 20 percent at the last general election.</li>
<li>Most spectacularly, more than 80 per cent of Russians are regularly reported as thinking Vladimir Putin is doing a great job as their president, compared with around 60 percent two years ago.</li>
</ul>
<p>I am hardly the first to ask this question. There is plenty of research (e.g. de Bromhead et al. 2013) on the economic conditions that foster political extremism, for example. But how do we get from economic conditions to wrong persuasion, exactly? There is the famous Goebbels quote about the &quot;big lie,&quot; which is fine as far as it goes but always makes me think: surely there's more to it than this?</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But it can't be true of all lies. Don't some lies work better than others? What is it that defines the ones that work? My best answer so far to this question is an analogy, which I know is less than proof. But it's a thought-provoking analogy; see what you think.</p>
<p>Last year some behavioural scientists (Str&otilde;mbom et al. 2014) finally explained how to herd sheep. There is a sheepdog, instructed by a shepherd, that does the running around. It turns out that there are just two stages. First, the dog must gather the sheep in a single compact group. Once that is done, the second step is to threaten the group from one side; as a group, the sheep will move away from the threat in the opposite direction. That's all there is to it.</p>
<p>The reason why the first step must come first is also of interest: If the dog threatens the sheep <strong>without </strong>first gathering them in a group, they will scatter in all directions, and that's <strong>not </strong>what the shepherd wants.</p>
<p>Anyway, there's the answer: <strong>Group, then threaten</strong>.</p>
<p>People are not sheep, and this is only an analogy. Nonetheless you probably already worked out how I would read this. The shepherds are the political leaders. The dogs that run around for them are the campaign managers and activists. The human equivalent of gathering sheep in a group is to polarize people around an identity that defines an in-group and an out-group. So Scots (as opposed to the English), Greeks (as opposed to the Germans), Russian speakers (as opposed to the rest). Group them, then threaten them, and they will move.</p>
<p>To see how the threat sets the group in motion we need one more thing, an insight from Ed Glaeser. Glaeser (2005) wanted to explain the conditions under which politicians become merchants of hate. He began with a community that has suffered some kind of collective setback. When that happens, people demand an explanation: Who has done this to us? &quot;Us&quot; means the in-group. Political entrepreneurs, he argued, will compete to supply satisfying stories. Often the most satisfying account is one that blames the in-group's misfortune on the alleged past crimes of some out-group: the English, the bankers, the Muslims, the Jews, or the West. </p>
<p>Not only past crimes, however; Glaeser uses the phrase &quot;past and future crimes.&quot; In other words, he maintains, politicians often transform these stories into powerful threats by giving them a predictive slant: This is what they, the enemy, have done to us in the past and this is <strong>what they will do again</strong> if we don't mobilize to stop them first.</p>
<p>Remember: <strong>Group, then threaten</strong>. The result is mobilization.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<ul>
<li>de Bromhead, Alan, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin H. O'Rourke. 2013. Political Extremism in the 1920s and 1930s: Do German Lessons Generalize? Journal of Economic History 73/2, pp. 371-406. URL <a href="https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v73y2013i02p371-406_00.html">https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/jechis/v73y2013i02p371-406_00.html</a>.</li>
<li>Glaeser, Edward L. 2005. The Political Economy of Hatred. Quarterly Journal of Economics 120/1, pp. 45-86. <a href="URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v120y2005i1p45-86.html">URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v120y2005i1p45-86.html</a> </li>
<li>Str&ouml;mbom, Daniel. Richard P. Mann, Alan M. Wilson, Stephen Hailes, A. Jennifer Morton, David J. T. Sumpter, and Andrew J. King. 2014. Solving the shepherding problem: heuristics for herding autonomous, interacting agents. J. R. Soc. Interface 11: 20140719. URL: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719">http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2014.0719</a>.</li>
</ul>GreeceHistoryPoliticsRussiaMon, 23 Mar 2015 08:00:23 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/how_do_bad/#comments094d73cd4be487e6014c3db5529b08750Russia's Improbable Futures and the Lure of the Past by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/russias_futures/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://rbctv.rbc.ru/polls/list" title="Related external link: http://rbctv.rbc.ru/polls/list">http://rbctv.rbc.ru/polls/list</a></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">On 27 January I was asked to join a panel on Russia's Future within the University of Warwick One World Week. (The other panel members were Richard Connolly, co-director of the University of Birmingham Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies, and the journalist Oliver Bullough.) I decided to talk about how Russians are looking to the past in order to understand their uncertain future. Here, roughly, is what I said:</p>
<p>Russia has many possible futures; all of them are improbable. The economy must do better, stay the same, or do worse. Relations with the West must improve, remain as they are, or deteriorate further. Adding them up, there are nine possible combinations. The probability of any particular combination is small, so each is improbable. But one of them must happen because, taken together, the sum of the probabilities is one. One of them must happen, but we have no idea which one.</p>
<p>Faced with an uncertain future, we often look to the past for guidance and reassurance. What was the outcome when we were previously in a situation that felt the same? At New Year, many Russians were looking to the past. I found this out when I stumbled on the website of RBC-TV, a Russian business television channel. Every day <a href="http://rbctv.rbc.ru/polls/list">the RBC website polls its fans</a> on a different multiple-choice question. On 30 December, the question of the day, with answers (and votes in parentheses), was:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>What should Father Frost bring for Russia?</p>
<ul>
<li>End of sanctions (6%)</li>
<li>End of the war in Ukraine (27%)</li>
<li>A stable ruble (7%)</li>
<li>Return of the Soviet Union (59%)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>It's disconcerting to be reminded of the strength of nostalgia among Russians for the time when their country was a global superpower. The Soviet Union united all the Russias -- if anyone's not sure what that means, that's Great Russia, Little Russia and New Russia (Ukraine), and White Russia (Belarus) -- with the countries of the Baltic, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia. The Soviet Union stood for strong centralized rule, with a powerful secret police and thermonuclear weapons. The nostalgia is shared by President Putin, who said (on 25 April 2005): &ldquo;The collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the [twentieth] century.&rdquo; </p>
<p>Here's a question that RBC asked its supporters on 25 December:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>Can direct controls and a price freeze save Russia&rsquo;s economy? </p>
<ul>
<li>Yes, the free market is not up to the job (55%)</li>
<li>No, that would cause insecurity and panic (40%)</li>
<li>No need &ndash; no crisis (5%)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>Again, the strength of support for the backward-looking answer is disconcerting. I tried to think of the last time the Russian economy was in a squeeze like today's. The last time the oil price price came down like this was the mid-1980s when North Sea and Alaskan oil broke the power of the OPEC cartel for a few years (that's <a href="http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/oil-prices-ceiling-and-floor-by-anatole-kaletsky-2015-01">the analysis of Anatole Kaletsky</a>). The disappearance of oil rents probably contributed to the collapse of the Soviet economy.</p>
<p>But a closer parallel to today is 1930, when two things happened at once. The global market for Soviet exports shrank in the Great Depression. And international lending dried up, meaning that the Soviet economy could not roll over its debts. The Soviet import capacity collapsed almost overnight. Stalin responded by forcing the pace of import substitution through rapid industrialization. He demanded &quot;The five plan in four years!&quot; The result was a crisis of excessive mobilization that claimed millions of lives in the famine of 1932 and 1933.</p>
<p>Prominent in calling for an economic breakthrough today is President Putin, who responded to Western sanctions on 18 September 2014: &ldquo;In the next 18 to 24 months we need to make a real breakthrough in making the Russian real sector more competitive, something that in the past would have taken us years.&rdquo; Government-friendly Russian economists are talking about <a href="http://svpressa.ru/economy/article/102320/">the need to go from a market economy back to a mobilization economy</a>. In case the foreigners aren't getting the message, first deputy prime minister Shuvalov told those assembled in Davos on 23 January: &ldquo;We will survive any hardship in the country &ndash; eat less food, use less electricity.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A third question that RBC asked its viewers was on 19 December:</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>What matters most for the country right now? </p>
<ul>
<li>The foreign exchange rate (33%)</li>
<li>Who is a true patriot and who is fifth column (56%)</li>
<li>&ldquo;Vyatskii kvas&rdquo; (11%)</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>(The English equivalent of &quot;Vyatskii kvas&quot; would probably be Devon cider. For the reasons why it was being talked up as a solution to Russia's problems last December, click <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/putin-press-conference-drunk-journalist-stroke/26751313.html">here</a>.)</p>
<p>Here the strength of support for the backward looking answer is shocking. What is the &quot;fifth column&quot; and how does it resonate in Russian history? In 1937, Stalin saw Moscow surrounded and penetrated by enemies. This coincided with the siege of Madrid in Spain&rsquo;s Civil War. In 1936 the nationalist General Mola was asked which of his four columns would take Madrid. He replied, famously: &ldquo;My fifth column&rdquo; (of undercover nationalist agents already in the city). In Madrid the Republicans responded by executing 4,000 nationalist sympathisers. In the Soviet Union Stalin, who was also watching, ordered the execution of 700,000 &ldquo;enemies of the people.&rdquo; </p>
<p>In recent times, the spectre of a &quot;fifth column&quot; was first reawakened by President Putin on 18 March 2014, when he remarked: &quot;Western politicians are already threatening us with not just sanctions but also the prospect of increasingly serious problems on the domestic front. I would like to know what it is they have in mind exactly: action by a fifth column, this disparate bunch of &lsquo;national traitors&rsquo;, or are they hoping to put us in a worsening social and economic situation so as to provoke public discontent?&quot;</p>
<p>Putin took up this theme again on 18 December 2014: &quot;The line that separates opposition activists from the fifth column is hard to see from the outside. What&rsquo;s the difference? Opposition activists may be very harsh in their criticism, but at the end of the day they are defending the interests of the motherland. And the fifth column is those who serve the interests of other countries, and who are only tools for others&rsquo; political goals.&quot;</p>
<p>Here you can see that Putin did affirm the possibility that opposition can be loyal. But is it possible for Russia to have a loyal opposition today? The only example of loyal opposition that Putin could bring himself to mention was the poet Lermontov -- who died in 1841.</p>
<p>These echoes of the Soviet past in Russian opinion today are disconcerting and even frightening. At the same time it is important to remember that, even while Russians look to the past, Russia today is absolutely not the Soviet Union. From today's vantage point it is nearly impossible to imagine how closed, stifling, claustrophobic, and isolated was everyday life even in late Soviet times. Russians in 2015 lead very different lives from Soviet citizens in 1985. They are richer, live longer, are able to visit, study, phone, and write abroad. Even today they are relatively free to search for and find information and discuss it among themselves. In all these ways, the transition from communism has not been a failure. </p>
<p>As Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman (2014) wrote recently: &quot;Putin&rsquo;s authoritarian turn clearly makes Russia more dangerous. But it does not, thus far, make the country politically abnormal. In fact, on a plot of different states&rsquo; Polity [i.e. democracy] scores against their incomes, Russia still deviates only slightly from the overall pattern. For a country with Russia&rsquo;s national income, the predicted Polity score [a measure of democracy] in 2013 was 76 on the 100-point scale. Russia&rsquo;s actual score was 70, on a par with Sri Lanka and Venezuela.&quot;</p>
<p>To see Russia as just another middle income country helps us to identify Russia's underlying problem. In Russia, just like in Sri Lanka, Venezuela, and most countries outside &ldquo;the West,&rdquo; wealth and power are fused in a small, closed elite, and that is how it has always been. The fusion of wealth and power was and remains normal. Before the revolution Russia was governed by a landowning Tsar, aristocracy, and church. After the revolution Russia was governed by a communist elite that monopolized all productive property plus media, science, and education. Today Russia is governed by an ex-communist, ex-KGB elite that has once again gathered control of energy resources and the media. This fusion of wealth and power is neither new nor is it unusual among middle and low income countries.</p>
<p>In societies where wealth and power are fused, particular people are powerful because they control wealth and the same people are wealthy if and only if they are powerful. This is what gives politics in such societies its life-and-death immediacy. To lose power means to lose everything; when power change hands there is often violence. &ldquo;All politics is real politics,&quot; write Douglas North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (2009); &quot;people risk death when they make political mistakes.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Several times in history, liberal reformers have tried to separate wealth and power in Russia and make space for public opinion. Here are some examples from the last 150 years:</p>
<ul>
<li>In 1864 a reform brought elected local governments &ndash; but within an absolute monarchy.</li>
<li>Shaken by military defeats and popular insurrections, in 1906 the Russian monarchy introduced an elected parliament, although with few powers, and ndividual peasant landownership, although (as it turned out) with little time for implementation.</li>
<li>In 1992 and 1995 Russia saw voucher privatization and &quot;loans-for-shares,&quot; creating a class of corporate shareholders &ndash; but the outcome was crony capitalism, not free enterprise.</li>
<li>In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovskii tried to separate the governance of Yukos from the &quot;power vertical,&quot; but he went to prison for it.</li>
</ul>
<p>All these efforts have so far achieved only partial or temporary success. Russia has not yet found a solution to the problem of the fusion of wealth and power. Here, at last, is an aspect of Russia's future that is certain: If Russia is ever to find a solution to this problem, it will be there.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Note: I updated this column after publication to correct a date -- 2014, which appeared as 1914.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<ul>
<li>North, Douglas, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast. 2009. Violence and Social Orders A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</li>
<li>Shleifer, Andrei, and Daniel Triesman. 2014. &quot;Normal Countries: The East 25 Years after Communism.&quot; Foreign Affairs, November-December. </li>
</ul>EconomicsHistoryPutinRussiaStalinWed, 18 Feb 2015 07:00:35 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/russias_futures/#comments094d73cd4b7e772a014b89d6d77701531The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex: New Year Insights from Dexter and Rodionov by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_soviet_military-industrial/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://warwick.ac.uk/vpk/" title="Related external link: http://warwick.ac.uk/vpk/">http://warwick.ac.uk/vpk/</a></p>
<p>Today sees a new version of the Dexter-Rodionov guide to <em>The Factories, Research and Design Establishments of the Soviet Defence Industry</em>. This is the sixteenth edition; the very first (in which I was co-author) appeared in January 1999. In that time the datset has grown from just over 2,000 entries to nearly 30,000, and the detail from around 100kb to more than 10Mb.</p>
<p>From the start this was a curiosity-driven project. The Soviet military-industrial complex was veiled in secrecy for decades. In 1992 the former Soviet archives were opened up for independent research. Google's Ngram viewer lets you see how the subject broke out into the light of day. The chart shows the relative frequency of the phrase &quot;&#1089;&#1086;&#1074;&#1077;&#1090;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080;&#1081; &#1074;&#1086;&#1077;&#1085;&#1085;&#1086;-&#1087;&#1088;&#1086;&#1084;&#1099;&#1096;&#1083;&#1077;&#1085;&#1085;&#1099;&#1081; &#1082;&#1086;&#1084;&#1087;&#1083;&#1077;&#1082;&#1089;&quot; (Soviet military-industrial complex) in Russian-language publications from 1917 to 2010. A few of these would have occurred in items published in Russian outside the Soviet Union; I suspect that explains the first observations from the 1970s and early 1980s.</p>
<p> <iframe name="ngram_chart" src="https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9+%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE-%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D1%8B%D1%88%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9+%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81&amp;year_start=1917&amp;year_end=2008&amp;corpus=25&amp;smoothing=3&amp;share=&amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2C%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%20-%20%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D1%8B%D1%88%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9%20%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%3B%2Cc0" width="900" height="500" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe></p>
<p>What were the factories that made Soviet weapons and military equipment? How many and how important were they? Where were they? When were they built? How specialized were they, and how self-sufficient? We just wanted to know.</p>
<p>My co-author of the time, Nikolai Simonov, was showing me some of the lists of secret (&quot;numbered&quot;) defence factories in the 1920s and 1930s that he had found in the archives. I knew that Julian Cooper at Birmingham had his own files. We were soon joined by Keith Dexter, an authority on Soviet aviation. We put together what we had and the result was <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/vpk/history/part1">the first edition of the present guide</a>. If you are at all interested in the history of exactly how and when the Soviet defence industry was made secret, I still recommend that you read <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/vpk/history/part1/preface.pdf">Julian Cooper's introduction to this first edition</a>.</p>
<p>Soon after that, Keith drew in Ivan Rodionov, another aviation expert, and so it became the Dexter-Rodionov guide.</p>
<p>What's new in version 16, apart from additional detail? The cover page carries the chart below, which shows the growing number of Soviet enterprises engaged in defence production from 1917 through 1991, distributed among the major production branches.</p>
<p><img src="http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/images/markharrison/2014/12/30/figure.jpg?maxWidth=500" alt="The number of Soviet defence plants, 1917-1991" border="0" /></p>
<p>Here are my takeaways (thanks to Dexter and Rodionov for drawing my attention to some of these):</p>
<ul>
<li>The breakneck pace of Stalin's rearmament from the mid-1930s is clearly visible. It culminated in the war, and the first spike which is recorded in 1944).</li>
<li>Also visible is the more moderate but sustained growth of defence plants after the war, including the rapid surpassing of the wartime peak.</li>
<li>There is a second spike in the number of defence plants in 1964. This was the year in which Khrushchev was outmanoeuvred and replaced by Brezhnev. It suggests an economic issue in the power struggle: was Khrushchev trying to build up defence production at a pace that others considered to be infeasible?</li>
<li>The changing composition of the defence sector has two striking aspects. One is the vast growth of radioelectronic establishments. By the end, this sector alone accounted for half of the entire Soviet defence industry.</li>
<li>The other aspect is the tremendous stability of the traditional sectors: armament, armour, and shipbuilding. It would not come as any surprise to a student of the Soviet economy to learn that they could create new sectors (like the nuclear industry or radioelectronics) but even if they wanted they couldn't close the old ones down.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, the chart shows us that by the end there were just over 5,000 plants engaged in defence production. How many is that? In 1987 (according to the Soviet statistical handbook of that year) there were more than half a million state-owned establishments of all kinds in the Soviet economy. So, we are looking at no more than one per cent of the total, and one per cent does not seem like a lot. The explanation is that most defence plants were relatively large. Their share in the whole economy, measured by capital assets or production, was many times greater than their share in the number of plants.</p>
<p>As for the share of defence production in the whole Soviet economy, we are still a long way from being able to pin that down. For any other country the most obvious way to do it would be to work from the expenditure side, by comparing the size of the Soviet military budget with the size of the economy, as opposed to working from the production side, which raises a lot of complicated issues about plant specialization and intermediate production. Alas, in the Soviet case it is no less of a problem to work from the expenditure side, because Soviet defence expenditures were also highly secret. Here I mean true military expenditures, not the officially published figures which were as phoney as a three-dollar bill. In fact, the real figures were so secret that by the end nobody knew what they were! And i mean nobody, literally; <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/mharrison/archive/persa/055.pdf">I wrote about it here</a>.</p>
<p>The Soviet military-industrial complex continues to throw up many challenges for historical research. The Dexter-Rodionov guide is a terrific place to start looking for both questions and answers.</p>EconomicsHistoryRussiaSecurityWarThu, 01 Jan 2015 06:00:34 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/the_soviet_military-industrial/#comments094d73cd47eebd8f014a9ad347d44e6a5Torture: Once You Start, It's Hard To Stop by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/torture_once_you/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/comment/torture.pdf" title="Related external link: http://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/comment/torture.pdf">http://warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/comment/torture.pdf</a></p>
<p>Torture is wrong. Applied to interrogation it is unproductive. Given these two things, it should be easy for interrogators to choose not to use torture. Despite this, torture is widely and persistently used in interrogation around the world. So here, apparently, is a puzzle. Why does torture persist? The solution to the puzzle is found in a third feature: torture is corrupting.</p>
<p>Today's publication of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence <a href="http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf">report on the Central Intelligence Agency 's Detention and Interrogation Program</a> will be noted mainly for its detailing of the fates of the 39 CIA detainees who were subject to &quot;enhanced interrogation&quot; (or torture).</p>
<p>Also notable, however, is the report's documentation of the CIA's determined defence of its practices, extending to concealment and misrepresentation of the facts in order to evade accountability. This defence began concurrently with &quot;enhanced interrogation&quot; but it is not confined to the past. It continues today and will no doubt be maintained tomorrow.</p>
<p>It was 9/11 that moved me to write regularly on public affairs. I didn't have a blog, so I just wrote short papers and uploaded them to a web page. In November 2001 torture was already being floated in public as a way to get US detainees to talk about terrorist conspiracies. It seemed to me that European history already provided ample evidence that this was a bad idea, so I wrote a short paper to explain why.</p>
<p>My last-but-one paragraph from that paper is relevant to the idea that torture cannot be a temporary expedient. Even if it turns out to be a bad idea, once you start, it's hard to stop. It also helps to explain why a body like the CIA would become committed to a bad idea and continue to defend it to the present. What I wrote thirteen years ago seems as good today as I thought then, so I'll quote that last-but-one paragraph in full. </p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p> A final and most important consequence is that <strong>the process of torture is corrupting</strong>. Torture creates employment for the interrogators, and privileges that stem from the capacity to instill fear. The practice of torture also attracts those who find it enjoyable and use it as an instrument of self&ndash;gratification rather than investigation. Thus it gives rise to vested interests in its continuation that do not wish to be held accountable for their actions. These interests are helped by secrecy. Torture takes place in secret. Most people find the subject distasteful and do not wish to know about it, and this further strengthens the wall of secrecy. The result is a part of the state that exercises a cruel and tyrannical power over society, one that grows inevitably with the extension of torture and has the power to resist subsequent attempts to curb it.</p>
</blockquote>HistoryTortureTue, 09 Dec 2014 21:04:55 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/torture_once_you/#comments094d73cd47eebd8f014a30d6889c498e0Capital is Back -- But Not As We Know It: Comment on Piketty by Mark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/piketty_is_capital/
<p class="answer">Writing about web page <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/seminars_readinggroups/historyseminar/" title="Related external link: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/seminars_readinggroups/historyseminar/">http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/research/seminars_readinggroups/historyseminar/</a></p>
<p>Recently Warwick&rsquo;s History Department held a roundtable on Thomas Piketty&rsquo;s important and bestselling blockbuster, Capital in the Twenty-first Century (Piketty 2014). I was on the panel, which was ably organized and chaired by Maxine Berg, whom I thank for the invitation. Here I&rsquo;ll summarize my remarks, which have benefited from listening to the other panelists and the discussion. For better or worse my words seem to have been modified by the passage of time; I sense that their tone has sharpened since that evening.</p>
<p>Piketty&rsquo;s book has been reviewed thousands of times; we have already seen reviews of the reviews. I have little to say that can be original. I prefer not to comment on Piketty&rsquo;s conclusions, because most readers seem to have made up their minds on those before reading the book. Instead, I&rsquo;ll focus on the early chapters, where Piketty sets out his contention that &ldquo;capital is back&rdquo;; nearly everything else in the book follows from that foundational claim.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s the short version of my assessment: <strong>The problem?</strong> Hugely topical. I won&rsquo;t spend any time on that. <strong>The model?</strong>Unobjectionable in principle, flaky in use. I&rsquo;ll explain briefly. <strong>The historical data?</strong> A wonderful contribution, yet they do not show what many suppose, and that would seem to include Piketty himself. <strong>M</strong><strong>y conclusion?</strong> Capital is back -- but not as corporate capital. If capital is back, it is not, apparently, because of financial deregulation or capital account liberalization. And, if capital is back, there are clear candidates for countervailing forces that will tend to restrict its further rise in the twenty-first century.</p>
<p>Now for the detail, some of it unavoidably technical. Let&rsquo;s start with the model. Piketty writes (2014, p. 32):</p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>The discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and highly ideological speculation &hellip;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(So of course we don&rsquo;t expect to find anything like that in the pages that follow.) What we do find is this:</p>
<ul>
<li>A first fundamental law (p. 52): the profit share in income rises with the profit rate on capital and with the capital/income ratio.</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;"><em>&alpha; = r&beta;</em></p>
<ul>
<li>A second fundamental law (p. 166): the capital/income ratio rises with the saving rate out of income (which governs the rate at which income adds to capital), and it also rises as the income growth rate falls.</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;"><em>&beta; &rarr; s/g</em><br />
</p>
<ul>
<li>A fundamental force (p. 35): profit rate on capital tends to exceed income growth rate.</li>
</ul>
<p style="padding-left: 60px;"><em>r &gt; g</em></p>
<p>The generality of the model is notable. In fact there is almost nothing in it, so far, that could be considered novel. It is also simple to an extreme. Of course, all models are just simplified representations of reality. Is it oversimplified? The question calls to mind the maxim of Box and Draper (1987, p. 74): </p>
<blockquote class="quotes">
<p>All models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our question for Piketty, correctly formulated, is not whether his model is &ldquo;wrong,&rdquo; as it surely is, but whether his model is &ldquo;not-wrong&rdquo; enough to be useful. Considered in these terms, the maths is not the problem. The problem is in the application of the maths to a necessarily complex reality.</p>
<p>How does this simple model lend support to the claim that capital is back? Piketty puts his two laws and the fundamental force to work in the following way.</p>
<ul>
<li>Start with the fundamental force: <em>r &gt; g</em>. Here is a gap, made up by the excess of the rate of return on capital over the growth rate of the economy. According to Piketty the gap has widened because <em>g</em> has fallen (pp. 99-102), but <em>r</em> is fairly stable and we do not expect it to fall (pp. 220-223).</li>
<li>Now the second law comes into play: <em>&beta; &rarr; s/g</em>. Piketty appears to argue that the saving rate is stable, or at least is not falling (pp. 173-178), but the growth rate has fallen, so <em>&beta;</em>, the ratio of capital to income, must be rising towards a new, higher steady state.</li>
<li>Finally the first law swings into action:<em> &alpha; = r&beta;</em>. Given that the capital/income ratio is rising and the rate of return on capital is not falling, the profit share in income must be rising too, with all that might imply for social inequality. </li>
<li>(The maths is neat too: the three expressions collapse easily into <em>&alpha; &rarr; s &times; r/g</em>, meaning that the steady-state profit share equals the saving rate times the rate of return over the growth rate. So far, the logic is unassailable.)</li>
</ul>
<p>The question that comes naturally to mind is whether Piketty might have neglected some countervailing force that would eventually nullify or attenuate the tendency that he has identified. (In thinking about this I&rsquo;ve been influenced by the insights of many, but I ought to mention especially Krusell and Smith 2014).</p>
<p>Picketty concludes that capital is back because, he maintains, the growth rate of the economy has fallen, the rate of return on capital is relatively stable, and so is the saving rate out of income. How robust is this chain? Consider each link in turn.</p>
<ul>
<li>First, Piketty asserts that the long-term growth rate of the economy has fallen: Maybe, but also maybe not. Secular stagnation is possible but the concept is also speculative and contentious (for discussion see Teulings and Baldwin 2014). It is even a little unhistorical &ndash; the last time secular stagnation was predicted was at the end of the 1930s, since when global output has multiplied by at least 10 times (Maddison 2010). If the prediction of secular stagnation turns out wrong, then Piketty&rsquo;s prediction is largely sunk by a countervailing factor: the return to faster growth will hold down the capital/income ratio and the profit share in income.</li>
<li>Second, Piketty asserts that the rate of return on capital will not decline as capital is accumulated. This outcome is possible, of course, in the general sense that we really don&rsquo;t know about the future of technology, but this one too is speculative and contentious. A long term conjunction of low growth, high capital accumulation, and high profits is (in my opinion) highly improbable. If we are doomed to secular stagnation, and capital accumulation continues unchecked, the return on new investments will surely fall relative to the past. If the return on capital declines significantly as capital is accumulated faster than income, then here is a factor that would automatically hold down the profit share in income. Thus, a fall in the rate of return cannot be ruled out and would be another countervailing factor.</li>
<li>Third, Piketty appears to rely on maintenance of the saving rate out of income. Others have noted that Piketty should have distinguished between gross and net saving. Here net saving = gross saving &ndash; depreciation, and depreciation means the annual deterioration of the capital stock through wear and tear and obsolescence. Piketty gets the definition, of course (p. 178), but on my reading he misapplies it. The point is that depreciation is a function of the capital stock: the more capital we hold, the greater must be our provision for its depreciation. Depreciation is not a function of income. If the capital/income ratio rises, then the depreciation/income ratio must rise too. Piketty doesn&rsquo;t appear to get <em>this</em> (p. 178 again), because he presents depreciation as a proportion of income, not of capital. If the capital/income ratio rises, the depreciation/income ratio must rise. If the depreciation/income ratio rises, and if gross saving is stable, then net saving out of income must fall. If the result of capital accumulation is a fall in the net saving rate, then this must slow net capital accumulation, making a third countervailing factor.</li>
</ul>
<p>The three countervailing factors are reasons why I concluded that Piketty's basic insight is flaky, in the sense that it might be a good description of what is going on but equally it might not. Still, this does not settle the bigger question: do its predictions fit the known facts? If so, it must surely still merit serious consideration; perhaps the countervailing factors are simply unimportant? </p>
<p>The test here is: what&rsquo;s been happening to the capital/income ratio? And Piketty&rsquo;s data do show that the capital/income ratio is rising, don't they? Well, let&rsquo;s check the data (and here I need to acknowledge a debt to Bonnet, Bono, Chapelle, and Wasmer 2014).</p>
<p>Piketty has five countries in his sample: Britain, France, Germany, Canada, and the US. These data show, as is now well known, a U-shaped pattern in the ratio of capital to income over the twentieth century: high at the beginning, slumping in mid-century, and rising again: hence, &ldquo;capital is back.&rdquo; </p>
<p>Piketty&rsquo;s explanation, by the way, is that in the era of the two world wars the asset markets of these five countries underwent a common pattern of regulation that depressed relative asset prices, and neoliberal deregulation has now released them.</p>
<p>But there are strange things in the data. They are not immediately apparent from Piketty&rsquo;s stacked-area charts, mostly because of the vertical ordering of the series. (To a smaller extent they are affected because Piketty does not understand how Excel processes the data for stacked charts when one of the series has negative values, as is the case for net foreign capital order in several countries, although only Canada is seriously affected.)</p>
<ul>
<li>First strange thing: If we accept that capital is back, it is not <em>all</em> elements of capital that are back, and it is specifically not corporate capital. It is residential capital. Residential capital is certainly part of the capital stock, but it is probably not what most people think of when they think about the return of (or on) &ldquo;capital.&rdquo; More likely they think about Goldman Sachs or Amazon. But capital is <em>not</em> back because of Goldman Sachs or Amazon.</li>
</ul>
<p>A simple calculation makes the point. For each country, take the increase in the capital/income ratio from 1950 to 2010. Then calculate how much of that increase is due to rising values of residential capital. The result is the proportion of the increase in capital/income from 1950 to 2010 that is explained by the increase in housing wealth:</p>
<ul>
<li>United Kingdom 72%</li>
<li>France 103%</li>
<li>Germany 102%</li>
<li>Canada 63%</li>
<li>United States 72%</li>
</ul>
<p>The figures show that in every country housing wealth accounts for at least three fifths of the increase in the capital/income ratio since the middle of the twentieth century, and in two countries (France and Germany) it accounts for <em>all</em> of the increase in the ratio.</p>
<ul>
<li>Second strange thing. If housing wealth is so important to the claim that &ldquo;capital is back,&rdquo; what can we say about the return on housing wealth? Go back to the basic model to recall that the stability of the return on capital is crucial to Piketty&rsquo;s prediction that the capital share of income is rising. Is the return on housing capital stable? No, it&rsquo;s not. Bonnet et al. (2014) show clearly that in four out of five countries the return on housing wealth, measured by the ratio of housing rents to housing prices, has fallen over forty years from 1970 to 2010: in the US by nearly 20 percent, and in Britain, France, and Canada by around 40 percent. Only in Germany has it risen.</li>
<li>Third strange thing: Asset prices are formed in markets. Sometimes, these markets are regulated, and this affects prices. There are variations across markets and across countries in how regulated these markets are, and I am not expert in measuring this variation. But I venture to claim that in every wealthy country the housing market is one of the most regulated asset markets. Indeed bad regulation of the US housing market was arguably a prime cause of the asset price crash and financial crisis of 2008 (Rajan 2010). And if housing wealth is increasingly a factor in inequality in the UK, policy interventions that have pumped up the demand and restricted the supply must shoulder much of the blame.</li>
</ul>
<p>To conclude: Capital is back -- but not as corporate capital. If capital is back, it is not, apparently, because of financial deregulation or capital account liberalization. And, if capital is back, there are clear candidates for countervailing forces that will tend to restrict its further rise in the twenty-first century.</p>
<p>if I had been Piketty&rsquo;s editor I would have been excited and honoured to publish his book. But I might not have allowed him to call it <em>Capital</em> in the Twenty-first Century. More accurately, it would have been called <em>Housing</em> in the Twenty-first Century. But then there would be a marketing problem, because Marx never wrote three volumes on Die Behausung, and Piketty's publisher would have lost a lot of sales. Well, that&rsquo;s business.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<ul>
<li>Bonnet, Odran, Pierre-Henri Bono, Guillaume Chapelle, and Etienne Wasmer. 2014. Does Housing Capital Contribute to Inequality? A Comment on Thomas Piketty&rsquo;s Capital in the 21st Century. Working Paper. Sciences-Po.</li>
<li>Box, George E. P., and Draper, Norman R. 1987. Empirical Model Building and Response Surfaces. New York: Wiley.</li>
<li>Krusell, Per, and Tony Smith. 2014. Is Piketty's Second Law of Capitalism Fundamental? Working Paper. Stockholm and Yale.</li>
<li>Maddison, Angus. 2010. Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1-2008AD. Available at <a href="http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm">http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm</a>.</li>
<li>Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap.</li>
<li>Rajan, Raghuram. 2010. Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.</li>
<li>Teulings, Coen, and Richard Baldwin, eds. 2014. Secular Stagnation: Facts, Causes, and Cures (VOXeu.org and CEPR)</li>
</ul>EconomicsHistoryInequalityWed, 03 Dec 2014 11:50:00 GMTMark Harrisonhttps://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/markharrison/entry/piketty_is_capital/#comments094d73cd47eebd8f0149f6f81d2144382